Now, more than ever, having a personal brand on social media is crucial for several reasons. Future employers look for a strong personal brand in their future employees, and people use their personal brands to become an influencer in their fields of interest. Of course, you already have your own personal brand outside of social media, but what social media does is create a visual element that acts as a public portfolio for people to follow. However, building your personal brand isn’t just hopping on social media and posting whatever. Precise thinking and strategic planning go into creating your personal brand. Here are five tips to consider when building your brand on social media:
What is a Personal Brand?
In order to know how to build your personal brand on social media, you must first understand what exactly a personal brand is.
A personal brand is a representation of yourself. How do you present yourself? How do you want to be perceived by others? What are all of the bits and pieces that make you stand out from the crowd? What are your passions? Values? These are just a few questions that go into building your personal brand.
1. Authenticity: Be Yourself
You can’t build your personal brand if you are trying to be someone else! Sure, you can emulate others (inspo is important!), but that doesn’t mean you should try to be their carbon copy. You are unique and you want to share your individuality on social media. Do this by posting images and text that are true to your values and beliefs. Post content that shares your stories and passions. Think of your favorite things — whether they be hobbies, movies, or animals. Incorporate those into your social media.
Example: If you have a passion for animals and want to be a associated with the greater animal loving community on social media: be sure to follow others who have similar interests as well as organizations that align with the passion such as, for example, the Last Chance For Animals, Found Animals, and ASPCA. Regularly repost their content and use hashtags that relate to the subject, so that you are staying involved with a cause you believe in and keeping your followers with the same passion engaged.
2. Passion: Your Focus
Find one thing that you are most passionate about — and make that the main focus of your personal brand. As mentioned in tip #1, you can incorporate many of your passions into your social media. However, there should be one passion that is the main focus of your personal brand. Examples are crafts, fashion, technology, and art. Whatever it may be, stick with it. Now that you have picked a predominate passion, you need to build a following.
To build a following based around your personal brand’s focus, there are a few strategies you can use. The first is using hashtags. Be sure that when you post content, use hashtags that others who have the same interest might view to get inspiration. These hashtags should be relevant to the content you are posting, as well as your focus. You can also discover other popular hashtags relevant to your passion through other people’s photos. Another strategy to build your following is to follow others who have similar interests as well as people who inspire you. Through doing this, you can gain inspiration, be discovered by others with the same passion, and maybe even make friends to potentially collaborate with in the future. You can find accounts based around your similar passion through relevant hashtags.
3. Consistency: Be Consistent on Social Media
Consistency is important to your personal brand in a couple of different ways. Firstly, consistency in image is crucial to your representation. To start, you need a profile image that allows people to get the gist of your brand simply by looking at it. DON’T be an egg. You need a profile picture on all of your social sites, as it is your logo. This picture should be the same on all of your social media so people recognize your brand. Color palette and font are also key to creating the recognizable look for your personal brand on social media. (Pro-tip: you can build your own “style guide” here.) When building your style guide, think of colors, symbols and patterns that you feel represent you as a unique individual.
Secondly, consistency in posting is essential in keeping your followers updated and engaged with your content. One site to keep you on top of your posting game (specifically for Twitter) is TweetDeck. There you can draft and schedule your Tweets so that you never slack on posting content consistently. If you prefer a more traditional scheduling technique: think of at least one day and time to post each week, write it down in your planner, and set a reoccurring alarm on your smartphone. Now you will never forget to post and your social media activity will be consistent!
When you post consistently on social media, you are giving your followers content to look forward to without having them question your presence and activity on social media. When you have a posting plan, you build trust in your followers, and that will keep them coming back to your page on a regular basis.
4. Responsibility: The Line Between Personal and Professional
Your language and voice is an important part of your personal brand on social media. Think of how you speak in person — the words you use, the tone of voice, etc. Now, make that voice flow through into your typed text online. Sounding natural and like yourself is what will make you sound authentic (see tip #1!) and casual. You do not want to sound like a robot on social media. However, you do not want to be too informal in that you are sharing matters that should be kept personal and separate from your personal brand, like private relationships for example. However, you can still use language to create informal, friendly conversation between you and your followers. Overall: Try to keep both your language between the line of formal and informal conversation.
Entertainers who have a comedic persona such as Miranda Sings and Liza Koshy can use their persona’s language to create informal conversation with their followers, as it is part of their character. However, this strategy is not the best route for the majority of us, as our priority is to not to just entertain, but instead to create engaging content and to join in a dialog with followers based on our common interests. One wrong Tweet or conversation in the Instagram comments section can greatly harm your personal brand and come back to haunt you at some point in the future, so think before you hit ‘post’. There doesn’t seem to be a week that goes by where a celebrity isn’t being scrutinized for a Tweet or a post that they made many years ago.
5. Design: Using Design Tools and Applications to Build Your Image
Finally, after putting all of the previous aspects of your personal brand together, there are ways that you can take both your brand image and content to the next level. There are several design tools and applications in existence that can create aesthetically pleasing images and advertisements to make your brand’s social media presence stand out. Edit beautiful photos by using photo editing apps such as VSCO, Juxtaposer, Enlight, and Afterlight. Using photo editing applications gives you the ability to find filters and effects that you can use in your brand image. And these apps can take a low quality image and make it stunning, which will look outstanding on your social sites. When editing photos to post on your social media, think of color schemes that correlate with your personality. Simple actions such as photo editing can greatly impact how people online perceive you.
For video content, there are also many applications available. Plenty of people use built-in tools like Windows Movie Maker and iMovie, but it’s easy to expand your video repertoire these days! A more advanced option is Final Cut Pro X for more precise video editing, but Animoto is great for shorter, fast moving videos in a square format.
When creating videos, consistency is important. When your followers come across your video in their feed, they should recognize it is yours in the first two seconds of playback. An intro and outro can help others recognize that it is your personal brand’s production. Video time is also important, especially for different platforms. For example, videos should be kept under a minute on Instagram, but should be around the ten minute mark on average for YouTube.
Finally, graphic design is an important aspect to your brand image. Canva (our secret weapon) is a great site because it comes with many templates that you can customize and make your own. These templates range from profile banners, advertisements, and even resumes — don’t forget that your resume is also an important element of your personal brand!
Consistency in your design is important because people should be able to know that it is your post or content based on the look and feel. The aesthetic should be synonymous with you. Organization and clarity are also key elements in graphic design. Creating content that your followers can clearly follow and understand will be appreciated by your following.
Having a personal brand on social media today is of utmost importance. You need to put your personal brand online because it acts as a public portfolio for future employers and gives you the opportunity to be a social media superstar in your field of interest. Five important aspects that go into building your personal brand on social media are authenticity, passion, consistency, responsibility, and design. Focus on these elements and in no time you will have created an amazing social media presence for your personal brand!
Metter Media LLC is a Boston-based social media management company that implements community-based, localized social engagement strategies small businesses and corporations alike. Need help with your social media? Email Lauren today.
